Just arrived back in Nashville from Macworld and other business meetings and “hanging-out” things in the Bay area. Yesterday, I had lunch in Berkeley with Dave Winer and then accompanied him on an expedition to Fry’s — which is, for those not tech-obsessed, a massive Toys ‘R Us for geeks. It’s amazing what one can learn by shopping at a Fry’s with Dave Winer — and a lot of fun. (Thanks, Dave.) He also allowed me to play tourist along our drive as we stopped for a few stunning views of the San Francisco Bay from a road that runs on the hilltop above the UC-Berkeley campus.
Later, I spent some time visiting with “former” b-to-b magazine guy Matt McAlister who has always amazed me with del.icio.us (and other) hacks he thinks up and tries out on his blog and other places. He now works at Yahoo! where, among other things, he helps publishers figure out ways to use their services — however I was visiting with him in an unofficial “how’d you do that?” capacity. As with almost everyone I’ve met via their blog, I was able to pick up the conversation with Matt mid-sentence despite never having met him “face-to-face.” (Thanks, Matt.)
I’ll be blogging more later about topics I discussed with Dave (regarding why a $600 Mac mini hooked to your HDTV may cost 2X the price of a $300 AppleTV but has 100X (or 1,000X) the capabilities) and Matt (regarding some things I’ll be experimenting with in the coming days).
NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh notes a nuanced elegance in the design of the iPhone:
“What sealed the deal, though, was a quiet milestone that the iPhone hits in design sophistication: it’s the first mobile device that I know of — and certainly the most elegant — to use the typeface Helvetica throughout its interface.”
Here’s a great story about how blogs work in mysterious ways. It’s about a dog named Thunder who needed a home and how a Nashville blogger “meat-up” back in December at which we were each encouraged to bring some pet food to donate to the Nashville Humane Society led to one thing that led to another. Actually, it started a long time before that, but I’ll let Wonderdawg and the commenters on his blog tell that part.
Technorati Tags: blogging, nashville
Many years ago, I started hearing about an online marketplace called Half.com that was “like eBay, except with a fixed price.” Being the experimenting type, I signed on and tried selling a few items and, sure enough, it was great. Next thing I knew, eBay bought it. My username on eBay still has -half in it as I had built up a seller reputation on that site before ever selling anything on eBay. I determined then if eBay sees a consumer-oreinted marketplace succeeding in a space anywhere close to theirs, there’s a good chance they will sweep in if the site becomes popular with their users. A few months ago, the resident futurist* at Hammock Publishing came into my office and asked me if I’d ever used StubHub.com to buy or sell Titans tickets and proceeded to marvel at the wonders of how successful he’d been at selling some tickets for a game he couldn’t attend. “How can eBay let this happen?” I wondered. Apparently, the folks at eBay noticed too as they just purchased StubHub.
*Our resident futurist earned his reputation by his observation that computers will play a bigger part in our lives one day — and they may even get smaller.
Technorati Tags: ebay
